


The Here & Hereafter

by snarkyscorp



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dark, F/M, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-15
Updated: 2011-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 19:12:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snarkyscorp/pseuds/snarkyscorp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In dim flashes, he sees them all in a dull parade: all the sad souls whisked away to the hereafter and gone, and how does anyone understand where they go?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Here & Hereafter

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 [](http://hp-nextgen-fest.livejournal.com/profile)[**hp_nextgen_fest**](http://hp-nextgen-fest.livejournal.com/). Thanks an incredible amount to [](http://bryoneybrynn.livejournal.com/profile)[**bryoneybrynn**](http://bryoneybrynn.livejournal.com/), who saved me with this fic and really put her all into helping me shape what it would become. All remaining mistakes are my own.

  
**The Here & Hereafter**   


++

_.Scorpius._

++

It cannot be helped. The first time they touch hands in a crowded hallway, everything seeps into darkness except the places where their fingers meet. Like an electric current, the shock stimulates, excites, and is gone, fleeting as moments often are.

But Scorpius knows that something has changed, traded between two strangers through the silence. The connection, the immediacy of its jolt, stays with him and lingers.

When Scorpius meets him again, he does not let the coincidence pass a second time but extends his hand in greeting. When they shake, it is more than the introduction of Albus Potter that stills his heart.

***

Scorpius sits by the fire, and Harry can't bear to look at him. To look at him is to know the feeling of death and grief and unspeakable feelings that blotch his face. To look at him is to be swept under the current of these things he cannot say, the things he cannot allow himself to feel. And so, Harry stands far away, unable to lay a hand on his shoulder or be the rock he needs to tether his sanity.

Harry wishes for Al, who can be all the things that he cannot. Young enough with a world ahead of him and few casualties behind, strong and well-worded, balanced and able to touch without fear of breaking. Albus would know that Scorpius is not a fragile piece of glass, could place a warm, comforting hand on Scorpius' small shoulder, tell him _everything's going to be all right_ and somehow make Scorpius believe him.

Harry feels incapable, and so he does not move for a long time. He just stands, wishing for Al and all the courage of adolescence.

It is only when Scorpius begins to sob that Harry shifts, ghostlike, the frayed-red edges of his Auror robes whisking across the floor. Harry kneels before Scorpius and draws him close.

It is a mistake when they kiss, but Harry cannot stop himself.

In their lips, Harry tastes Scorpius' tears, and phantom reminders play at the back of his mind like childhood nightmares come for a haunt. In dim flashes, he sees them all in a dull parade: Sirius, Dumbledore, Hedwig, Dobby, Remus, Tonks, Fred, Snape, all the sad souls whisked away to the hereafter and gone, and how does anyone understand where they go?

***

Ginny watches them from the kitchen. They have a little window for such purposes—when she and Harry bought the house, Ginny wanted to be able to entertain, to invite their friends and family over, to talk to Harry through that window while he cooked or set up hors d'oeuvres. Now, she is watching Harry show Scorpius how to play poker. His father never taught him, so he asks stupid questions that make Harry laugh. His laugh sends thrills through Ginny every time, just like when they were first married or before, the lucky times she was a privileged one who got to see Harry _really_ smile.

Harry's smile lights up rooms, his moods like weather patterns that shape every landscape they touch.

Al is in Romania with Charlie, James an Unspeakable with never enough time to visit, and Lily is still in Hogwarts. It is nice to have a young presence in the house again, but this boy is not her son and there is something unsettled in Scorpius, something that brings a lump to Ginny's throat when they meet in a narrow hall together, alone except for Harry still asleep in the master bedroom…

_"Good morning, Scorpius," Ginny says._

_"Mrs Potter." Scorpius nods._

_"You're up early."_

_They are walking together towards the bathroom—Ginny does not remind Scorpius that there is one closer to the guest room._

_"Yes," he says._

_Even in the darkness, Ginny can tell that something is wrong. His face is covered in red embarrassment, he refuses to meet her eyes, and he wrings his hands into his nightshirt—one of Harry's old t-shirts, she recognises. When she stops, so does Scorpius. The uneasy moment swells. Ginny wants to tell him to go back to sleep, to go home, but instead she has her fingers running through his hair as if he were a favourite pet. It is meant to comfort and then becomes something else. Scorpius is so small in this moment, like a little boy, and he reminds her what it was to be young and have the whole world ahead of her, a life she could not even imagine dangling just beyond reach. Ginny misses that anticipation, the moment before she knew where her life was headed, the rush of adrenaline, the dive, the tempestuous insistence of more, more, more and those wonderful days before the body count rose and her brother lay listless at her feet._

_They say nothing. When their eyes meet, Ginny's heart races. She knows that look. She knows. She knows. She doesn't want to see it anymore, and then they are kissing and her back is against the wall and his mouth is moaning into hers and his fingers are running up the hem of her nightgown and then inside her—dry, insistent, clumsy, trembling, rushed,_ oh God, please _—and she is panting and gasping and his mouth finds her nipple in the darkness but she can still taste his tears on her lips when she licks them._

 _And the floorboard creaks down the hall. Ginny jumps into the loo, shuts the door, locks it, and sinks to her knees and hopes_ Oh Merlin _that Harry didn't see what they were doing._

Playing poker with Scorpius, Harry shows no signs of knowing anything. He just smiles in that casual, blissful way, and patiently shows Scorpius how to bluff. Scorpius is surprisingly not very good at it. Ginny can read his tells, how he is hanging on by a single thread, which she may have snapped in the hallway this morning, which tore so long ago in her and has been tied back together so many times that one more snap might be the end.

++

_.Albus._

++

It happens like this: James is desperate and Al is watching.

No, it happens like this: James is crying and Al is his comfort.

No, it happens like this: James is on the bed and Al is on the bed and they are on the bed together and it is like always but not and the tenuous feeling shifts as the bedsheets do and James looks and sees the things he shouldn't, but neither of them say stop until it's too late and their mouths are moving together in a rhythm both frantic and controlled, passionate and subdued. They are together, whole, fitted, joined—one.

It happens like this: fast and strange and sudden and awing. It happens with hands and pricks and fingers and tongues and moans and a hitch of pain that sharpens James' senses and says _no, you shouldn't_ but he does and does and there is no escape from how badly he needs and takes and ruins.

James does not say a word or he yells about perversion or he throws Al out or he spoons up close from behind for hours without saying a word, without moving or breathing, just lays because he knows it will be the last time it can be like this, simple and sweet and so in love.

James doesn't remember how it began or how it ended, just that it was and that it shapes him every day, even the times he knows he hasn't thought about Al for hours, because a moment like that just changes two boys, two brothers, into something else. Indefinable, James retreats into the world, and Albus is alone. He sees him from far away, as if through a fog and incomprehensible. Something is missing now; something has shifted and is gone.

They were thick as thieves and like twins before it happened. James always saw the way Uncle George watched them and saw through the simplicity. _He had a twin,_ Aunt Angelina whispered once after a visit. _He's not like this always, I'm sorry. He sees him and Fred in you and Al, and I think it does things to him._ James tries not to smile so much around George and that rubs off everywhere, bleeds into the times Al tries to sneak into his bed again and James shoves him out into the dark alone. He asks Dad what happened to Uncle Fred, and for once Dad is speechless.

It happens. Like this. And James doesn't owl for months, because all the words on the parchment just say _Albus, Albus, Albus_ and nothing more.

***

Al always shows up in the middle of the night. The nightmares are constant, Teddy knows, the lingering shadows of things his young brain cannot fully comprehend crowding his sanity into corners, leading him into the dark streets and onto the Knight Bus and to Teddy's doorstep with sopping wet hair and a look that tears Teddy's heart from his chest. Al always looks like he's been ripped apart by lightning, his eyes so empty and so full both at once, brimming with things unsaid and things unknown. _Of course, you can come in_ , Teddy says, and Al doesn't speak for hours or sometimes ever at all, but Teddy hopes the weight of his hand on Al's shoulder helps.

Teddy has nightmares too, about all the dead things that linger in the ghosts of photographs Harry and his grandmum gave him. A man called Father, a woman named Mum—they are ghosts to him, listless in their graves and speechless in their smiles. They tell Teddy nothing of what he wants to know, nothing of what he needs, and share no answers to help him cope. On a loop forever smiling, waving, innocent and naïve with their silenced lives, emptied of souls. Teddy sees and does not see them; they are manufactured to him, things locked up in his chest without names, things that are past redemption and grotesque in their misshapenness.

Once, upon a midnight visit, Al asked, _what happens when we die?_ and Teddy never had the right answer for him, because Harry never had the right answer for Teddy, and Harry never had the chance to ask anybody for himself. But some tenuous understanding passes between them when Al curls against his sofa in silence, in between the ticks of the clock and the howl of the wind and the soft way Al's breath ghosts over Teddy's knuckles when he lays his head in his lap, Teddy's hand trapped and wanting so badly to touch.

Teddy is bred from monsters—werewolf and Metamorphmagus blood clawing through his veins and biting at his heart. It does not surprise him when he starts to want more than Al can give, when Al visits and Teddy mouths the water off of his cheeks and sucks it from his lips, gnaws it off his tongue. Teddy is a monster inside, an orphaned creature full of longing and insistent, patronising desires that spin his head and tangle his gut. He wants and wishes he does not want. He takes and regrets the taking.

Al calls him James the first time, and Teddy knows this is a warning of all the awful things to come, but he does not stop. So vulnerable, Albus bends to him, for him, with him. Teddy holds him for hours, and they do not speak, but understand.

Teddy is not sorry—monsters have no guilt.

When Albus leaves, Teddy sits on his balcony in the rain, listening for the whispers of ghosts in there here and hereafter. They say _I'm sorry_ and _It's all right_ and _Don't be frightened_ , but Teddy cannot reconcile their words with the weight of the reality gnawing on his heart. The rain speaks, but Teddy does not understand its language.

***

Dragons are amazing creatures. Uncle Charlie always says that dragons are much easier to understand than humans, that if humans had cues like dragons then maybe Charlie would be married with kids. But humans complicate things, and now Al sees that.

Humans, for example, cry. Water just floods out over their cheeks, and they wail like babies. When Al sees Scorpius crying, he thinks, _Why can't he mourn like a dragon, in silence and with humility?_ Dragons do mourn, of course—Al saw a mother nuzzling its dead offspring, breathing warmth against its open mouth in a sorrowful attempt at resuscitation –but at least dragons don't sob and shake and have fits about it.

When Al was a baby, he cried. When Grandma Weasley died, Al hovered over her grave like a phantom, sinking his fingers into the cold earth, sobbing for a connection that had been severed. He was like any other small boy who scraped his knee and wept for his father, but there was a moment when something inside just shifted and gave way for something else. He cannot pin down the exact moment in time, but he knows still that it happened. He is very far away from that little boy now, from the young man who could hug his brother and not want something more, distanced and different and holding everything behind a perfect façade of controlled stoicism.

Al sees Scorpius crying and knows exactly what to say, what to do, but he is only going through the motions now, because he likes Scorpius, not because he thinks it's easy or uncomplicated. Scorpius Malfoy is perhaps the most complicated human on the planet. He has known this for years, since they first met and sparks and bells went off in his head and the things he could never say became lodged in his chest.

"Do you think there's life after this, after death?" Scorpius begs.

Al knows what he is supposed to say, what Scorpius wants to hear. "Yes," he says and smiles, though he is incapable of meaning it. Everyone sees him and thinks he's fine, but he's not; it's just a strange mirror that proves nothing of what he is inside. Softly, he adds, "And your mum is in that hereafter now, a better place. She's finally at peace, happy."

But Al is really thinking, _no, there is nothing after this, just a rotted corpse in the dead earth with maggots eating it out and an emptiness for everyone who ever loved you and black holes for eyes and nothing nothing nothing else beyond, it just ends and stops and it's done_. Al knows there is nothing, because humans are the only species he knows that give a shit. Dragons don't care. They mourn, they move on. They know there is a beginning, middle, and end to all things. Humans complicate matters by clinging, hoping, wishing.

Al gathers Scorpius in his arms and soothes his shuddering body. When Scorpius mouths at his skin, Al doesn't stop him. This is good. This is better. This is what moving on does, even if it's only a distraction. Scorpius' hands on his thighs—this is what makes him feel. Scorpius' mouth on his prick—this is what he needs to connect. Scorpius' tongue in his arse—this is what they have become, two boys scrambling to pick up the broken fragments of their lives, the pieces that are jarred and frayed and sharp with things unsaid. Scorpius' cock inside him, the gasp of his mouth, the splash of come so deep it almost hurts—this is what keeps them sane when Scorpius cries and makes Al think about his dead grandma and James looking at him from so far away and how Teddy must feel being orphaned and how Dad grew up seeing dead things everywhere and how that changes a boy to a man and into something beyond that is undeniable and unspoken.

For a while, Al holds Scorpius after, until Scorpius falls asleep. Then, Al gets up and crawls into James' old bedroom, remembering the exact second that everything changed, the moment after Grandma Weasley's funeral when he touched James for the first time and said _I love you_ and meant it in a way that broke the tentative things left vulnerable between them. As the tears come, Al lays down in James' bed and sobs into the smell of his pillow.


End file.
